CMSC 848Q

Logistics

Location	IRB 1116
Time	Mon. / Wed. 08:30 AM - 09:45 AM
Webpage	http://umiacs.umd.edu/~jbg/teaching/CMSC_848/
Homework Submission	https://www.gradescope.com/courses/303336
Mailing List	https://piazza.com/umd/spring2026/cmsc848q
Syllabus	https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VaIUHiEVU6dZ6y8uega-Z4SV6R4KdFSNkbXAo4V5Dck/edit?usp=sharing

People

Professor

Jordan Boyd-Graber
IRB 4146
Office Hours (IRB 4146): By appointment

Teaching Assistant

Wichayaporn "Joy" Wongkamjan (OH Thursdays 15:00-17:00, Online)

Schedule

Date	In-Class Topic	Assignment Due
Monday, 26. January 2026	Snow Day
Wednesday, 28. January 2026	Snow Day
Monday, 02. February 2026 [Tu B'shvat]	Question Answering in Society (And thanks to Snow Days, also IR)
	Class Recording Panopto (Requires sign in) https://umd.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=ef07cec6-01a7-4a4d-87ad-b3e500df98e8 Videos (Overview) Homework Structure How to take a class with me Flipped Classrooms How to read the course webpage Videos (General take on QA, setting up course topics) How question answering saved civilization What AI Researchers can Learn from Trivia Nerds A history of recreational question answering Videos (Information Retrieval) What is information retrieval? TF-IDF Evaluation The Cranfield Paradigm slides Structure of the course, why QA is important How to take a class with me How question answering saved civilization What AI Researchers can Learn from Trivia Nerds A history of recreational question answering Watson on Jeopardy! What is information retrieval? TF-IDF Evaluation The Cranfield Paradigm External Readings Introduction to Braniac Question Answering for the Curated Web, Chapter 1 Question Answering for the Curated Web (Alternate Link) Evolution of Cranfield Evolution of Cranfield (Alternate) Textbook Questioning Artificial Intelligence, Chapter 1 Questioning Artificial Intelligence, Chapter 2 Questioning Artificial Intelligence, Chapter 4 (first half) Textbook Source (for corrections / comments) IR Book Chapters 1, 6 About (link for pull requests) Author (link for pull requests) Structure (link for pull requests) Civilization (link for pull requests)
Wednesday, 04. February 2026	Giving a Presentation of a Paper
	videos How I Record Videos Lost Opportunity of Conference Videos Why Virtual Conferences will Continue to Suck How to Read a Paper How to Make a Good Presentation The best presentations of ACL 2023 Letitia's recording setup (Optional) readings Role-playing seminar
Friday, 06. February 2026	Homework Due	Warmup: Threshold
Monday, 09. February 2026	Good Old Fashioned QA
	videos GOFAI Approaches for QA Statistical QA / Watson Watson on Jeopardy! KB QA The Turing Test Feature Engineering in the Age of Deep Learning Feature Engineering for Quiz Bowl slides GOFAI Approaches for QA readings NLQA: The View from Here The Watson Project Question Answering for the Curated Web, Chapter 3 Turing's Two Tests for Intelligence BASEBALL Textbook 3 Textbook 4 (second half)
Wednesday, 11. February 2026	LLMs
	Representation Learning Videos Distributional Semantics Word2Vec RNN for Sentiment RNN for LM Sequence Models in Pytorch Backpack Models Muppet Model Videos Neural Language Models What to call these models? Follow-up (Optional) Transformer Encoder BERTology Decoder Implementation Details Representation Learning Slides Distributional Semantics Word2Vec RNN for Sentiment RNN for LM LSTM Muppet Model Slides Neural Language Models Transformer Encoder / BERTology Readings: SNLP 19 (Was 9) The Annotated Transformer
Friday, 13. February 2026	Homework Due	Presentation
Monday, 16. February 2026	QA Datasets
	videos QA Datasets Cranfield vs. Manchester Multihop Natural Questions Five Years Later Do iid questions even Exist? slides QA Datasets Cranfield vs. Manchester Multihop readings SNLP Chapter 23 Taxonomy of NLP QA (Optional)
Wednesday, 18. February 2026	Extractive QA
	videos Dr. QA Dense Retrieval BERT for MRQA RL Review Alignment Policy Gradient RLHF slides Dr. QA Dense Retrieval RL Review Alignment Policy Gradient readings MRC Literature Review
Friday, 20. February 2026	Homework Due	Prompting and Fine Tuning
Monday, 23. February 2026	RAG

Wednesday, 25. February 2026	Fact Checking
	videos NLI Fact Checking slides NLI Slides readings NLI Automated Fact Checking
Friday, 27. February 2026	Homework Due	RL
Monday, 02. March 2026 [Taanis Esther]	Long Form QA
	videos Generation for QA Long QA slides Generation for QA Slides readings Generative Long-form Question Answering: Relevance, Faithfulness and Succinctness (Chapter 2) Evaluating Open-Domain Question Answering in the Era of Large Language Models
Wednesday, 04. March 2026 [Shushan Purim]	Conversational QA
	videos Conversational QA slides readings Conversational Information Seeking (Chapters 2,7) Ditch the Gold Standard: Re-evaluating Conversational Question Answering
Friday, 06. March 2026	Homework Due	Project Proposal
Monday, 09. March 2026	Writing a Paper

Wednesday, 11. March 2026	IRT and Leaderboards

Friday, 13. March 2026	Homework Due	Literature Review
Monday, 16. March 2026	Spring Break
Wednesday, 18. March 2026	Spring Break
Monday, 23. March 2026	Midterm Review

Wednesday, 25. March 2026	Midterm

Monday, 30. March 2026	Adversarial

Wednesday, 01. April 2026	Thinking / Reasoning Models

Friday, 03. April 2026 [Pesach]	Homework Due	Baseline
Monday, 06. April 2026 [Pesach]	Evaluation Pitfalls: Equivalence, MCQA, Bad Questions

Wednesday, 08. April 2026 [Pesach]	Collaboration

Friday, 10. April 2026	Homework Due	Abstract / Intro
Monday, 13. April 2026	Multilingual / Multicultural

Wednesday, 15. April 2026	Visual QA

Friday, 17. April 2026	Homework Due	Methods
Monday, 20. April 2026	KB and Tabular QA

Wednesday, 22. April 2026	Audio QA

Friday, 24. April 2026 [Shavuos]	Homework Due	Figures
Monday, 27. April 2026	Personalization
	videos Personalized QA slides readings Episodic Memory Question Answering Situated QA
Wednesday, 29. April 2026	Other Formats
	videos International QA Formats Crosswords Multiple Choice slides readings Dr. Fill
Friday, 01. May 2026 [Pesach Sheni]	Homework Due	Complete Draft
Monday, 04. May 2026	Paper Clinic

Wednesday, 06. May 2026	Ask Me Anything

Monday, 11. May 2026	Project Poster Session: 13:30-15:30

Good AI Answers to Questions: How to Get Them and What Can Go Wrong (CMSC 848Q)

Logistics

People

Professor

Teaching Assistant

Schedule